I have posted up a review of the newly released (In Europe again) The Longest Journey, an excellent point and click adventure by Empire/Funcom. Here is a snippet from the review:

The Longest Journey is a point and click adventure, if you have ever played Grim Fandango, Monkey Island etc then you'll know exactly what I am talking about. You play the part of April, a young student who has been having bad dreams and it is up to you to find out exactly what these dreams mean and why you are having them. The Longest Journey is full of logical puzzles and a massive amount of speech and the great thing is - there are no action orientated parts in the game, it is just pure adventuring.

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I have now posted up a review of the newly released (In Europe at least) Martian Gothic: Unification by Take 2 games. Here is a snippet from the review:

Martian Gothic plays like Resident Evil and Alone In The Dark, in that I mean that the camera angles are all pre-determined depending on which areas of a room you are walking in. As many of you can probably already guess, there are some problems with this type of camera as it can sometimes stop you from viewing certain places you are trying to view, thankfully that doesn't happen all that often in Martian Gothic.

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The Justice Department said Microsoft Corp. is using its monopoly power to hurt competitors in the market for personal digital appliances, specifically mentioning the Palm Inc. computing platform.

The Justice Department comments, which were contained in arguments filed in support of the government's proposal to split up the software giant, could cast a cloud over Microsoft's launch earlier this month of its Pocket PC hand-held computer.

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Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) has vowed to fight the federal government's plan to break up the company into two separate parts, a battle that will begin not in court, but in the stock market on Monday.

That's when traders return to Wall Street, where the company's stock will be under the microscope - offering a key test of consumers' confidence in the company. For Microsoft, it signals the start of a long battle.

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I have posted my first review in a while - it is of the new shoot-em-up come flying game - Flying Heroes. Here is a snippet:

The interface is also similar to popular first person shooters on the market today, Flying Heroes is very similar to that of Unreal Tournament. Along the top of the screen is information on mission progress, such as your position in the a tournament, number of cannons destroyed etc, there is also information on time limit in tournaments and tag time in multiplayer games. Finally along the top of the screen is a small area that gives out information on who fragged who during the game. In the center of the screen is the main frag arena consisting of information on opponents names and their position on the screen. Finally along the bottom of the screen shows health points, manna points and temporary effect icons such as fire boost, invisibility etc. In the right corner there is information about the quantity of ammunition that you currently have as well as objects you hold and the current active weapon. Early weapons in the game range from the very dull Spark gun to the icicle cannon. Weapons are bought with the money you get from each tournament match (You get money for frags etc), but you can also spend it on upgrades to you ship/creature as well as other things.

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Following is the statement by U.S. Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein made on Friday on the U.S. Justice Department's proposal to break Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) into two separate companies:

"The Department of Justice has just filed our proposed remedy in the Microsoft case with the Federal District Court. We are asking the court to enter an order establishing a process under which Microsoft would be reorganized into two companies: an operating systems company and an applications company.

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The proposed division of Microsoft probably wouldn't mean any drastic changes for consumers, at least in the near term. Habit, familiarity and the relative dearth of buoyant alternatives are some of the intangible factors that will likely allow the Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software suite to maintain their dominant positions on the desktop.

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The U.S. government on Friday urged a federal judge to break software powerhouse Microsoft Corp into two separate companies to curb its monopoly power in key software.

The Justice Department and 17 of the 19 states that brought one of the biggest antitrust cases in U.S. history formally unveiled the proposed breakup of the company in a 17-page proposed order to a federal judge.

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Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has decreed what everybody on the planet outside a few bucolic acres in Redmond, Wash. already understood: Microsoft is a monopoly, and a nasty one at that. Now comes the hard part: what to do about it.

Proposed remedies have included smashing the company into ones and zeroes and spanking Bill Gates on all prime-time television except for MSNBC. I wouldn't go quite that far. In fact, I have come up with a better solution, which I hereby submit as an amicus curiae.

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The breakup of Microsoft, as proposed by prosecutors today, could well have a salutary effect. But not the one they're looking for.

By separating the Windows operating system from the rest of the company, the government hopes to re-ignite innovation in the software industry. Without a giant monopoly to bully competitors out of business, the thinking goes, smaller companies will be free to develop products able to challenge Microsoft Word, Excel--even Windows itself.

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Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men and chairman of Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news), said on Friday he held a 5.04 percent stake in Otter Tail Power Co. (NasdaqNM:OTTR - news), an electric utility located in Fergus Falls, Minn.

The stake, equal to 1,201,400 common shares, was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document was made on behalf of Gates and his investment vehicle, Cascade Investment LLC. The passive investment filing did not say when the Otter Tail shares were bought or at what prices. Otter Tail was up 1 at 24 on the Nasdaq stock market on Friday afternoon.

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Are two Microsofts better than one? That's the debate raging among analysts, observers and, most of all, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) shareholders as they await details of a U.S. Justice Department plan to split the software giant up as penance for its antitrust sins.

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The government was poised Friday to urge a federal judge to split Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) in two, aiming to create new competition and eventually end the firm's monopoly in the basic software that runs personal computers.

The filing of the proposal by the Justice Department and most or all of 19 states that sued Microsoft nearly two years ago was expected to be filed after financial markets officially close.

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While all eyes are focused on the effects that a possible breakup of Microsoft Corp. might have on the company's future, few are contemplating the more immediate impact of the launch of the software giant's forthcoming services architecture, dubbed Next Generation Windows Services, or NGWS. If you believe Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), NGWS is going to be big. Really big.

Microsoft executives have likened the potential impact of the NGWS launch to Microsoft's 1995 Internet Strategy Day. They are publicly touting the NGWS rollout as a major inflection point for the company.

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Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) on Thursday said Chief Executive Steve Ballmer will appear in a television commercial, in a move by the software giant to burnish its image just after the government unveils its plans to punish the company for breaking antitrust law.

The 30-second advertisement will kick off on Sunday during prime-time shows on broadcast and cable networks, and is similar to one featuring Gates that ran three weeks ago, shortly after a federal judge ruled Microsoft was an abusive monopoly.

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Technically boring, unimaginative and pushy is how many in the high-tech industry see Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news), but most agree the software giant has been the life of an extraordinary party that nobody wants to leave.

As it starts its anticipated long battle to avoid a breakup, Microsoft finally may be unable to provide the leadership it's given for nearly two decades as a financial model and an arbiter of industry standards.

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Details of a plan to break up Microsoft will be released today when the Justice Department and 19 states that successfully sued the software giant for antitrust violations submit their joint proposal on what sanctions to impose.

The remedy, which would split Microsoft into two parts, is intended to prevent the company from engaging in any illegal behavior in the future. The proposal would forbid the split companies from recombining for 10 years, according to a published report.

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Network Appliance has welcomed Intel back into the fold.

On Monday, the company will announce a new low-end product, the NetCache C1100, a thin specialized server that's built around an Intel chip. NetApp's first products were based on Intel chips, but the company moved to Compaq's Alpha chips because data can be transferred into and out of the chip faster.

Using Intel chips allows NetApp to expand into a less demanding, lower-priced market, said Edward Chow, leader of the company's Internet caching products. The new products, with prices starting at less than $6,000, are intended for modest computing loads, such as those at branch offices of larger corporations, Chow said.

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Microsoft Corp. should be split into four companies to end its anti-competitive practices, a group of leading economists told the judge who declared the world's largest software company an illegal monopoly.

The economists made their recommendation - which goes far beyond the two-way Microsoft break-up government lawyers are expected to propose - in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted to U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

Instead of stopping with a split of Microsoft into a Windows operating system company and an applications software company, the economists would further divide the Windows unit into three separate competing companies.

''The full divestiture would be the most effective way, in our view, of introducing real competition into the platform market, or reducing the applications barrier to entry, and of reducing or removing Microsoft's ability to project its operating systems monopoly into other markets,'' the economists wrote.

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Microsoft has patched a Hotmail bug that left users of the Web-based email service vulnerable to a password-stealing trick.

The exploit was the latest in a series devised by bug hunters using JavaScript to launch fraudulent password entry screens to trick people into handing over control of their accounts.

JavaScript is a Web scripting language designed to take actions on a Web site visitor's computer, such as launching a new window or scrolling text across the screen, without the visitor's interaction. After the first few password-stealing schemes came to light, Hotmail and other Web email providers decided to filter JavaScript from incoming messages.

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As expected, Microsoft's new space sim StarLancer has been released a little early in a number of stores (Phone to make sure). The official release date worldwide is tomorrow, we should have our review of the gold code sometime early next week.

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If the U.S. government proposes to split Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) in two as expected this week, it will draw immediate comparisons with the two other major breakups in U.S. antitrust history -- Standard Oil and AT&T.

Microsoft's competitors in Silicon Valley say the comparisons are apt and even extend them -- casting Bill Gates as a software tycoon in the role of a latter-day John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron.

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U.S. software giant Microsoft Corp MSFT on Thursday dismissed suggestions that its Windows 2000 operating system breaks European Union competition rules. Microsoft, already facing the threat of being split in two after antitrust problems in the United States, was responding to an investigation by the European Commission into whether Windows 2000 could give the company a stranglehold over server software and ultimately electronic commerce.

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Apple enthusiasts are hoping that Microsoft's newest Office suite has been worth the wait. The company today will release details about a new version of Office for the Macintosh, which will feature integrated email and contact management software.

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Copier giant Xerox Corp. (NYSE:XRX - news) and software behemoth Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) plan to host a press conference on Thursday to unveil a new firm that will be focused on media management over the Internet.

A spokesman said that the firms will host a news conference at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which will be attended by Microsoft president and chief executive Steve Ballmer and Xerox president and chief executive Rick Thoman.

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What's a company to do when a market slide has left many employees holding stock options that are worthless in the near term? Microsoft, which has produced a large share of the Seattle area's millionaires because of its generous stock-option plans, responded to its current precipitous stock drop with a swift, counterintuitive answer: offer more options.

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The Department of Justice and 19 states who successfully prosecuted Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations will file their proposed remedies at the last possible minute, according to sources.

Presiding U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson gave the plaintiffs until Friday to file what they think the punishment for Microsoft ought to be, and now sources say that's when the paper will be filed -- late Friday afternoon.

Just what punishment the DOJ and states' attorneys general will ask for is not clear. Various published reports earlier this week said the government was leaning toward suggesting a breakup of the Redmond, Wash., software company. Some reports said the DOJ would propose Microsoft be broken in two, with one of the companies focusing on Office software and the other on Windows. Still other reports cited sources saying the proposal would call for a three-way split.

None of the reports have been confirmed, and the DOJ declined to comment again today.

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Asian organized crime has shifted from hard-core and gang-related activities to hardware and software piracy because the profits are high and the risk of getting caught is low.

"The penalties [for piracy] are not severe enough to create a deterrent as are other crimes such as drug trafficking, extortion, robbery and prostitution," said Richard LaMagna, director of worldwide piracy investigations at Microsoft Corp. who spoke Monday at the 22nd International Asian Organized Crime Conference held in San Francisco.

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With one foot in the past and the other in the future, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has had more than a full plate during his first 100 days as CEO of the world's most powerful technology company.

During his first quarter in office, the 44-year-old Ballmer, who took the reins from chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates in January, spent an inexorable amount of energy fighting off the U.S. government for alleged wrongdoings committed in the past.

Meanwhile, Ballmer drove forth what is arguably the most dramatic shift in Microsoft's charter since the company was founded 25 years ago, Next Generation Windows Services, Microsoft's new Internet strategy.

With Gates keeping a watchful eye, Ballmer and staff launched Windows 2000, christened a new services company with Andersen Consulting called Avanade, announced a reorganization of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to handle Next Generation Windows Services, and created a new employee incentive plan to curtail the defection of talented people to its competitors.

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What Microsoft is calling the future of networking technology faces significant hurdles from both outside and inside the company. Universal Plug and Play (UPNP) is software designed to allow networked devices, appliances and home computers to communicate and share information. The technology, expected to be widely available by late next year, competes with several other initiatives; one of those is Sun Microsystems' Jini, which is designed to perform the same functions using Java-based technology.

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imandi.com, the leading reverse marketplace Website, today announced the appointment of John Connors, Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq ``MSFT''), to its Advisory Board.

``We are delighted to welcome John aboard, and look forward to benefiting from his fantastic experience and strategic understanding as we pursue our rapid growth,'' said Raghav Kher, President and CEO of imandi.com, which is based on a Microsoft IIS platform.

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Microsoft Corp.'s next version of Windows, code-named Whistler, offers some signs about how the company is moving toward delivering software as a set of Internet-based services running on multiple devices.

Top Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) executives, speaking Tuesday at the company's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in New Orleans, publicly demonstrated the forthcoming operating system for the first time. Whistler is not yet in alpha testing, but internal pirated copies have made their way onto the Web at least twice in recent months.

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Fatbrain.com (TM)(Nasdaq: FATB - news), the leader in managing, marketing and distributing information for businesses, today announced the launch of an additional online, custom bookstore for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news). The Windows 2000 Online Bookstore, a Fatbrain.com Information Exchange solution, provides the latest books and training materials for Windows 2000 developers, users and IT professionals worldwide. This new bookstore is the seventh online bookstore Fatbrain.com has developed for Microsoft since 1998.

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Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Chairman Bill Gates says breaking up the company he helped found 25 years ago would hurt the average consumer.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Gates said further development of the Windows operating system, the software that powers the vast majority of the world's personal computers, would be stunted if the Windows or Office software divisions were split from the rest of the company.

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Bill Gates, center, appears as "Austin Gates" on a video at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Tuesday, April 25, 2000 in New Orleans. Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. delivered the keynote address to the group at the opening session.

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Intel's Pat 'Kicking' Gelsinger, the company's desktop products group VP, will today unveil the long-awaited final spec for USB 2.0 at WinHEC. USB 2.0 takes the bus' data throughput up to and beyond IEEE 1394 standards. 1394 currently runs at 400Mbps - USB 2.0 will run at 480Mbps, forty times greater than USB 1.1's 12Mbps. USB 2.0 hubs will support version 1.1 peripherals, but not vice versa.

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Very good news for most of us in the UK. British Telecom today announced their full plans for rolling out ADSL in the United Kingdom from £39.99 for a single USB user. BT also announced that they will waive the installation fee of £150 if you sign up before June 30th.

• High Speed access at 512Kbps– around 10 times faster than a good modem
• 24 hour connection – no dial up: you’re there, you’re online
• Broadband-enabled content – news, entertainment and information, from companies like the BBC, Carlton and Sports.com, all formatted for near-instantaneous downloading

Sign up here

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Microsoft Corp. staffers have been auctioning off copies of Windows 2000 software on eBay, a practice the company frowns on but has had only mixed success reining in.

Senior management has cautioned employees and contractors that the private resale of company software is against Microsoft policy. Yet in the past week 23 copies of Windows 2000 have been put up for auction on the eBay Web site from people living within a 25 mile radius of Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.

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WinZip 8.0 Final has been released today. Here are a few of the major new features:

• WinZip Wizard functionality has been extended to allow you to create and update Zip files from the Wizard. After the initial Welcome panel, the Wizard displays a new Select Activity panel; from here, you specify whether you want to unzip/install, update an existing archive, or create a new archive. Like the existing Unzip/Install Wizard, the new Add Wizard is designed to make the most common operations easy and convenient.
• The Wizard can now extract and install from MIME and other encoded files. This makes processing of e-mail attachments from online service such as AOL and CompuServe easier for Wizard users.
• The Wizard now supports automatic installation of desktop themes and screen savers (see below for more information).

Download Here

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Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that he was extremely bullish about the software giant's future and was confident the company would avoid being broken up in the U.S. government's antitrust case against it.

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Microsoft employees will receive a new bundle of stock options at Monday's low closing price, a move designed to offset the stock's poor performance on Wall Street in recent weeks.

In an internal e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, told all company employees they would receive an additional stock option grant equal to any previous grants they had received since last July.

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The U.S. Justice Department will brief President Clinton's economic team on Tuesday on its proposal to break Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) in two in its effort to promote competition in the software industry.

White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said no decisions would emerge from the noon briefing. ``The Justice Department is providing an informational briefing to the president's economic team,'' he said.

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As part of the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) embedded and appliance platform strategy unveiled at the Windows® Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2000, Microsoft Corp. today announced the forthcoming availability of the Microsoft® Windows CE 3.0 operating system in June, as well as its development tools Platform Builder 3.0 and eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0. In addition, Microsoft will make evaluation copies of these development tools widely available via the Web. This will enable millions of developers to utilize their knowledge of the Windows-based programming model and easily develop on the Windows CE platform, including targeting applications for the recently released Pocket PC.

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Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corp., painted the vision of an exciting future for the personal computer Tuesday during a presentation to 3,000 industry partners at the Windows^® Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2000. Gates unveiled what he called a "concept PC" that included innovative features he said would become standard in the near future and could serve as a platform to test new user interfaces and future versions of the Microsoft^® Windows operating system. In addition, Gates noted that the PC architecture is poised to become the foundation for new kinds of embedded appliances and devices.

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K-tel International Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced that K-tel will begin selling thousands of titles from its music library as digital downloads this spring. One of the Internet's original retailers and distributors of music, entertainment and consumer products, K-tel will offer its content for sale directly from the K-tel Web site, at http://www.ktel.com/.

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Microsoft Corp. and InfoImage Inc., a leading decision portal provider, today announced the delivery of freedom™ 2, fulfilling the vision the two companies announced in October 1999. InfoImage provides enterprise digital dashboard solutions using the InfoImage freedom 2 B2B Decision Server and the freedom 2 B2E Decision Server. freedom 2 uses the Microsoft^® knowledge management platform, which includes Office 2000 desktop productivity software and Microsoft server applications. Customers of all sizes, including Mitsubishi Fuso Truck of America Inc., Bestfoods, Frank Russell Co., Rhythms NetConnections Inc., click2learn.com Inc., LoanCity.com Inc. and Visioneer Inc., have selected the solution to pare costs, improve communication and sharpen decision-making for knowledge workers.

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Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates was in danger of being eclipsed as the world's richest man by Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison on Monday after a sharp drop in Microsoft shares.

Dragged down by a disappointing sales forecast and investor concerns that the world's biggest software firm might be broken up by regulators, Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) stock plunged 12- ^5/16 to 66- ^5/8 on the Nasdaq. That brought the value of Gates' 742 million Microsoft shares to $49.4 billion.

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Shares in U.S. software giant Microsoft Corp (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) showed a healthy recovery in morning trade in London following their sharp fall the previous day in the wake of disappointing earnings figures announced before the weekend.

Having closed $12-5/16 lower at $66-5/8 on Monday, Microsoft shares traded on the Instinet electronic brokerage system as high as $68-1/2.

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A proposal to split up Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) into separate companies is among a ``full array of options'' being considered as remedies against the software maker. A Microsoft spokesman denounced the proposal as ``extreme and radical.''

Attorneys for the Justice Department and the 19 states that successfully sued Microsoft for antitrust violations are considering ways to break up the company as a method to curb anticompetitive practices. One reported option would be to split the company into two or three parts, each selling separate products, such as the Windows operating system and Internet content. Another alternative would be for Microsoft to divest its popular Office software.

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